Well, I just got out of Dr. Coppinger's office. Very interesting stuff, that. He obviously knew about the problems that we were having with Creativity, *but* he didn't know how little the class had to do with writing. I went in, sat down, and talked to him about the class and how it really didn't feel like a composition class, to which he said something to the effect of, "We felt like it would be good to stretch the honors students into being comfortable with new ways of writing." He specifically mentioned writing. So I showed him all the writing we had done. All two pages of it, outside of worksheets.
He was... stunned. He knew from talking with Wilson and Scholl that there were far too many worksheets, but he hadn't realized that we didn't do any writing. I think we've finally given him something substantial that he can work off of: a composition course ought to involve composition, and if it doesn't, it may be necessary to change the nature of the course. Clearly, the easiest way to do this is to change the professor, but Coppinger can't come out and tell me that, although he kept saying that they were in the process of "restructuring" the Honors composition department. Apparently, the first part of this process is dropping Comp I, which many people have CLEP or AP credit for, anyway. Hopefully, after today, the second part will involve changing professors for comp II.
One of the last things I asked him was if the change in department chair would have any effect on this, and he said that it would. However, he is in a pretty sticky situation. He doesn't want to "hurt anyone's feelings," which I completely understand; I'm bad about that, too. But I'm fairly certain that he sees the need for a change. Before next spring.
I'll be encouraging Elizabeth and Katy to stop by, and I may need to go talk to Dr. Sumrall at some point, but that'll happen in the future, if it's needed.
Posted by Gallagher at March 2, 2004 08:17 PM